Is Cameroon The Next Nigeria?

Going over the statistics for the Proxy List, I noticed a new trend. Over 27% of my unique users come from Cameroon. In fact these folks (Cameroonis?) have taken the top spot from the USA and pushed Spain down to #3 (I never did look into why Spain was so fond of proxies but they were always there at the #2 spot consistently).

Although I have been shown to be out of the loop on hardware issues, I'm generally well-informed when it comes to security. And my own Web site. I think.

So I hit up Google on the subject and found this story. Here is a telling excerpt:

Scamming has become a very lucrative business among youths, especially among university students most of whom have either abandoned studies or graduated and are jobless. Through this new-found medium of getting easy wealth, youths now drive posh cars and own the latest design of mobile phones. In the small University of Buea community, there is a new group of affluent youths who inundate bars on a daily basis and stay all day long in cyber cafes, luring and defrauding gullible people.

Arguably, scamming is one of the most booming and ‘admired’ industry that employs thousands of youths throughout the country. Police sources revealed to The Post that internet scamming greatly tarnishes the image of the country, eroding its credibility. Meanwhile, The Post learnt that it is difficult to charge and prosecute scammers since it is difficult either for the victims (most or all of whom are foreigners) to come to Cameroon and make claims in court or show evidence that they were defrauded by one individual or the other.

Also I found this recent article concerning cheap Internet availability in Cameroon. Check out the vid on that page for "Super Camerooni".

Whether this is a new development or just under-reported, it's news to me. I know the security lists have been mum on the subject (419 scams are usually brushed off, there's never any new info). Perhaps all African scammers are labelled "Nigerian" just to save column space. Regardless, Cameroonis are hitting the list like a red headed stepchild at Kroger's (local joke, I think). Scammers need proxies. I have proxies, which, for the most part, I have stolen from scammers (the database has nearly a million proxies - mostly dead - that came from a single scammer site).

Does that make me an accessory? I hope not. If it does I'd like a percentage for my trouble, thank you.

Chase Down Mr. Hinky Dink

I've been going over the stats for the Proxy List and noticied a growing trend in search engines referrals. It used to be I'd get hits for mundane stuff like "proxy Houston" or "proxy list no codeen" and the like.

Now, they're searching for little old me!


Awww... isn't that sweet?

CoDeeN-Free AT LAST

Things have changed slightly on The List. I have finally kept my original "CoDeeN-Free" promise. The servers are there, but have been moved into three text files. One has all CoDeeN servers, another has just USA CoDeeN servers, and the last has only non-USA servers.

I moved them because most were found on the same day and since the list is sorted by "date found" they took up about 4 contiguous pages. And besides, no one really likes them and they're generally avoided.

In fact, some Rat Bastard CoDeeN server operator in fucking POLAND bitched to my ISP because I pulled five lousy pages off his server! FIVE LOUSY PAGES! Maybe 8K max! Creep! Run a PUBLIC PROXY and WHINE when THE PUBLIC uses it? Utter nonsense. Die, bitch!

Useless.

Plus, this fucker's proxy is all over the Web. (Check this out as well.) Why pick on Hinky?

What really pissed me off is that this is a network torn off from NeoStrada, which is where a lot of the UT cheatzors come from.

Anyway, I put his address somewhere where it won't be used again (by me), but I left it in the CoDeeN list just to piss him off.

Eat that!

Another DEAD Hitachi Drive

I used to be fond of Hitachi drives. I have an ancient 4G SCSI Hitachi that never gave me any problems (in fact, come to think of it, I've never had a problem with a SCSI drive). Their IDE line of hard drives ("Deskstar") are a different story completely.

As it turns out, I was the out of the loop on this one. I didn't get the memo.

These suckers are notorious. Who knew? There was, in fact, a class action suit filed against IBM because of them and techies have been calling them "Deathstar" drives for years (and I thought I had just now cleverly made that up).

NOW they tell me.

It was about a year ago that one of these suckers brought down BOT House. It was months before I could recover the data. And that was a fluke.

I had, unwisely, bought two of these damned things. The other I installed in a Windows XP system for my kid, Rinky Dink. That particular drive died last week. This turned out to be good timing since he was coming home for Thanksgiving. He dragged his whole system home for Dad to fix. (He also brought his bride-to-be, the future Twinky Dink, home with him. Nice girl. She knows the wireless password now, so she's part of the family whether she likes it or not. Unfortunately, she's a Mac user.)

When I popped it out and looked at it, I noticed his drive and the BOT House drive were manufactured almost exactly a year apart. And they died almost exactly a year apart. We both got about three years out of them. Very suspicious, since they had a 3 year warranty (coincidence? I don't think so!).

Lucky for him, Dad doesn't do Thanksgiving (being an atheist as well as a vegetarian), so I took another Busman's Holiday to fix his system. Since it died the week before I had time to pre-order a Western Digital 160G replacement drive.

I would've gotten a larger drive but all they (TigerDirect) had were... that's right... Hitachi drives! In fact it seems IDE drives are going the way of CRT monitors. They were outnumbered 4:1 by SATA drives. You probably won't be able to buy IDE drives this time next year. Stock up now because the price of Old Tech always goes up (with the exception of those CRT monitors).

Plan A was to GHOST the drive and fix the OS after getting a clean copy.

There was no Plan B.

I know there are some excellent Open Source alternatives, but I'm an old hand at GHOST'ing, although I haven't used it on a daily basis since the late 90s. I first encountered it in 1996 when it was called "General Hardware Orientated System Transfer".

"Orientated". That always irritated me, from the moment I saw the version 1.0 startup screen. The correct term is "Oriented", dickwad. English, motherfucker, do you speak it? Stupid shit. What a joke.

And that joker laughed all the way to the bank after he sold GHOST to Symantec.

I have version 8.3 (c. 2005) and 7.5 (c. 2000). I started with 8.3 since it was written after Windows XP and it didn't seem wise to use a version that pre-dated XP by a couple of years.

That was my first mistake. 8.3 simply hung trying to read the drive ("hung" is not the right word, it infinitely reset the drive and showed no sign of ever stopping). I dropped back to 7.5 and the same thing happened. I started playing with command-line switches and had better luck, but it would copy about 13% of the drive and die. I did this until about 4AM Thanksgiving morning, when I finally hit on the right combination:

GHOST -NTIC -FRO -BFC -IA -OR

I finally got past 13% so I let it run and hit the sack. When I woke up it had an hour to go. I spent the time playing UT (and getting slaughtered). When it was finished it had found a total of 64 bad blocks.

I booted it up, Windows ran CHKDSK, rebooted, and... everything was fine!

Except I had an 80G drive image on a 160G disk. The command line options I used precluded resizing. I used gparted to do the resizing, which got slightly complicated because the data drive was on an extended partition. Extended partitions can't be moved and I needed to do that because some idiot (me) only allocated 20G for the C: drive and Rinky was constatntly running out of space on it. That required backing it up, resizing the system partition to a comfortable 60G, creating a 100G data partition, and restoring the data.

I was done by about noon Thanksgiving morning.

Still, those 64 bad blocks are a concern. Who knows what was on them? Apparently not the OS or it would never have booted. So far everything seems OK, and the application that was nearest and dearest to Rinky's heart (World of Warcraft) was on the data partition, which survived intact.

So we have a Happy Ending for all concerned and I have learned a Valuable Lesson (Google before you buy anything). If you have a Deathstar, back it up now.